Sunset Overdrive is amazing so far.
This one was infamous for a brief moment in 2014, which... Jesus that was an eternity ago. I wasn't even an adult yet. And the whole reason I was interested was twofold. Firstly that people said it's kind of a skateboarding game (it's not), a genre I never played (TOny Hawk was before my time and I wasn't a suburban White boy), and secondly that the Internet hated it. I remember it was like yesterday. Sunset Overdrive had the NERVE, the fucking NERVE, to be joyous and goofy and unabashedly preteen-boy-that-thinks-hes-cool-cool, and at that time prestige vidya games still tended to need to be serious business. Oh yes, I remember back when proto-incels hated that proto-foids played Angry Birds instead of Battlefield, Dark Soul was the Dark Souls of Dark Souls, and the greatest game ever made was The Last of Us, see, because it was like a zombie movie, but it was
a game, so it was like a playable zombie movie, which meant it was 10/10 storytelling, I cry every time.
You see what I'm getting at. Sunset Overdrive was tonally at odds with its era, so it got excoriated for being tryhard and cringe. And at some point I'm reminded of its existence and I think back to myself "wow my spidey sense is telling me that we, the collective "gamers" (gamers were a thing back then) were probably massive faggots."
Well, we WERE massive faggots. This is wonderful. It made me go fuck yeah ten times in the first five minutes. I made a character, right off the bat, that is a giant Batman the Animated Series-looking lunk of a man, basically a giant mandingo Elvis (Black, pompadour, massive Chad jaw, built like a brick shithouse, muttonchops) and dressed him in a fruity shirtless vest and tight running shorts and makeup and a drum corps hat like the 1st Grenadier Regiment of San Francisco.
The game is what the studio that did the modern Spiderman games cut their teeth on. It's a movement system gimmick game like Dying Light, Ass Creed and Just Cause. You have a modern city with rails (which I mean in the broadest sense, power lines, rails, anything that looks suggestively rail-like) to grind on, things to bounce off of to jump very high, and you use that to fight mutants (zombies, coming in massive swarms). The aesthetic is unironic 1990s X-Games sort of punk, totally radical, you know. The mutants are caused by an energy drink.
The funniest shit is that this 2014 release has your Q, your gadget wizard, be a jive-talking Black man that looks like he'd play craps in a 1970s Harlem alleyway (got the fedora, chain, shirt unbuttoned at the top) named
Floyd. Yes, like the Saint Floyd.
The humor is more ambient than anything. Not funny on its own merits but exists entirely in service of going wheeeeeeeeee. It's not like Borderlands lolsorandom, it's more very light (lowbrow, low effort) satire, light lolsorandom and wisecracking mixed together. The fact the game comes with a "vulgarity filter" tells you all you need to know about it being aimed at a mixture of young teens and adults. Which is why it utterly flopped with the srs gamer demographic.
Only played a few hours but I'm very content with having purchased it.
By contrast, I also booted up Suzerain. Without trying to powerlevel myself too much, I have a formal background in work involving constitutional stuff and loved Disco Elysium. I found it so fucking boring I had to leave it for another day and try. Nothing like exposition by loredumping Ruritanian political movements at me and setting up my character as a choose your own adventure novel.
If it didn't click during the castle sequence (if you got that far) I don't think it'll click at all.
I gave up right at the point in the castle where you escape the hook you're impaled on by the milf vampire. Since you said that I looked it up, saw with shock the castle is just one stage of hte world, not the centerpiece. I don't think it's going to click with me. Not that Resident Evil itself wouldn't click wiht me, necessarily, but my goodwill was already drained even as my curiosity was raised.
I don't handle actual horror well and I suspect that for a "horror-ish" Deep Southern thing South of Midnight (I loved We Happy Few from the same devs) would work better for me. People were slagging it off as woke but from what I've read it isn't, it's just... about Black people. In Louisiana. Where Black people live.
